Ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to Agile.
The first rule of Agile is
You do not talk about Agile.
The second rule of Agile is
Read MoreAgile Fight Club
Mixed Agile Arts
“Agile” is all the rage and for good reasons.
If only you could reverse-engineer all that agility and mass-reproduce it.
Specialists and experts alike have been working hard at it, playbooks in hand, with metrics in tow and tools to boot.
You will want to follow their lead but the truth is, you will be misguided!
Read MoreCarefully Outline
Your venture is like writing a book: you can work your way through it one chapter at a time, or you can put in some serious work upfront to carefully craft an outline.
Which is best: get going or carefully outline?
Don’t listen to me, listen to Amor Towles.
Amor Towles spent seven years writing his first book and ended up with, well, no book at all.
After that, before writing the first chapter of his next book, Amor Towles committed himself to creating a detailed outline of the entire book, “so I can then focus on the poetry, bringing things to light.”
The result is bestselling novels: Rules of Civility (2011) and A Gentleman in Moscow (2016).
What does this have to do with Agile?
Agile values incremental implementation (think of it as writing your book as you go along) over strategy and overarching solution design (writing an outline)—and as Amor Towles warns us, this can have unfortunate consequences.
Read MoreJust Enough
Come to think of it, you won’t find “just enough” in the list of principles behind the Agile Manifesto, but it’s always something to aim for.
To be clear, “just enough” is not “just OK.” Striving for one is good, while settling for the other is not. Simply put: just OK is not OK.
So don’t settle for “just OK.” Don’t settle for “good enough” either. Instead, go for “just enough.”
Go for “just enough” and work at it because it’s harder than you think: having just enough of something means you not only have the right amount of it, but also the right kind, at the right time.
Just enough: the right amount, of the right kind, at the right time.
Read MoreA Team’s Quest
One of the tenets of agile is continuous improvement. Not any kind of continuous improvement, mind you: continuous improvement by the people who do the work.
As Martin Fowler puts it, a key part of any agile practice is “the notion of thinking about what we’re doing and how we can do better, and it is the team that’s doing the work that does this, that is the central thing.”
And it is in this spirit of continuous improvement—driven by teams—that the following article presents the “Quest”: a simple tool that puts teams (not you and me) in charge of continuous improvement.
But first, for comparison purposes, let’s touch on another tool that’s meant to help teams improve: maturity models. In theory, it makes sense to use a maturity model. In reality…
Read MoreIn theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”
